Holy $&#!

This post is going to discuss how we at Myxer approach the issue of potentially offensive material appearing on our MyxerTones website, or otherwise being made available through our Myxer platform. Where do we draw the line with respect to what can be posted to the site? Given that we are essentially just a service provider for our user community, should we instead give tools to the community that allows every visitor to draw their own line? Should we feel obligated to help balance, e.g., the right of every person to self-expression with the wish of every person to avoid hateful, disturbing, or vulgar content?

These questions are very old, and there is no solution. Hopefully, this post will at least help people to understand how Myxer currently feels about some of these topics, and will provide enough background to demonstrate that we take these issues very seriously – probably far more seriously than a casual visitor to our website thinks at first blush.

Discussing potentially offensive topics without offending

Speaking of blushing, one of the problems I face in writing this post is figuring out how to talk with any specificity about profanity, nudity, drugs, guns, or any other fun stuff (ha, ha) without actually offending anyone.

Oops, too late.
Inside our company, I think we’ve gotten to the point of being able to communicate relatively efficiently about these topics. For example, our meetings on the subject no longer consist of each of us taking turns blushing, laughing nervously, or avoiding eye contact while gently lofting various uncomfortable words in an apologetic and barely audible manner. But it has taken time to get here. And were it not for the fact that all of us here are good friends with a high degree of mutual respect (and generally a long history together), this would’ve been almost impossible. If we weren’t so close we wouldn’t know, for example, that he’s not a pedophile and she’s not a racist and this guy doesn’t kill baby seals for fun on holiday.

Not much fun for little Harpo

Let’s get the obvious out of the way from the start: Everybody is different. Even the same person is different from one situation to another. So every visitor to our website is going to have a different idea of what’s offensive (and what’s fun), leading us to admit defeat from the get-go: it is absolutely impossible to insure that people are not exposed to something they find offensive unless they are exposed to nothing at all. Dory said something along these lines when she commented on a promise Marlin made to his son Nemo. Marlin promised that he would never let anything happen to Nemo, to which Dory said, “Well you can’t never let anything happen to him. Then nothing would ever happen to him. Not much fun for little Harpo.”

If we want to be fun (and we do), and we want to allow independent voices to express themselves in ways that differ from the prevailing “mainstream” (and we do), then we will sometimes offend some people. I’m sorry. Sortof.

Communities form, and form from, shared values

We all have values that are uniquely our own. They are, of course, shaped and shared in many very complicated ways by our family, friends, neighborhood, teachers, personal experiences, and probably a few hundred million years of evolution (if you’re into that kind of thing), among countless other factors. Part of what makes a community a community is, I believe, some set of shared values. So I think one might imagine it’s not out of the question that a litmus test could be developed that would determine, for some particular exhibit, for one particular community, whether it should be considered inappropriate or not.

It was this idea that led to the original method used on MyxerTones to identify what material should be considered inappropriate. What we did was add a “report as inappropriate” link next to every item, putting the job of identifying what shouldn’t be included in our catalog into the hands of the user community. (The original idea was that we would automate the process of removing inappropriate content from the site after it reached some threshold of “votes” by users, though we’re still doing this process manually).

What I really like about this approach is that, in principal, it allows us (Myxer) to remove ourselves from the position of being some moral authority. The community would use its shared values to determine what was allowed and what wasn’t, and we wouldn’t have to spend our time making lists of what were vulgar words and which configurations of human flesh would trigger an “inappropriate” label.

And if the Myxer user community had stayed a small one, and had intersected with a relatively small set of other communities, this might have been sufficient. The set of shared values might’ve stayed large enough to allow the “flag as inappropriate” scheme to be a fairly efficient filtering mechanism. But the Myxer community has grown to be larger than the population of many countries, and it attracts hundreds of thousands of people from very different backgrounds and external communities that – at least when it comes to determining what constitutes vulgarity or pornography or violence (or indeed whether these things are even offensive at all) – have a relatively small set of shared values.

This problem is just one inevitable result of the fact that the world is made up of an almost infinite number of overlapping, constantly changing communities of varying importance and influence. At one extreme exists “the world community”, a community that shares a relatively small set of common values. At the other, every individual can be thought of as their own personal community, with a rather more complete set of values. (I resist the notion that each individual has an entirely complete set of personal values, because it’s been demonstrated to me that even a single person often has multiple ideas that are put to use in different situations. Las Vegas has built a multi-million dollar advertising campaign around this idea (“what happens in Las Vegas…”).)

Divide or Dilute?

Faced with a large user community that has divergent tastes and values, the “flag as inappropriate” approach becomes problematic. It’s rather obvious in hindsight, but as we’ve continued to add people to our Myxer community, the percentage of contributed content that is considered “appropriate” by everyone has become smaller and smaller. This has forced us to consider whether we should maybe:

1. Lower the threshold of what is considered inappropriate to accommodate the values of the most (hard to find the right word here) conservative users in the community-at-large.
2. Define more than one threshold for offensiveness, along the lines of the MPAA ratings (PG, PG13, R, etc.)
3. Segment the population into smaller sub-communities that are more likely to share the same values, and allow each sub-community to set its own thresholds on inappropriateness;

The first option is essentially continuing on with the status quo. As our community grows to include people like advertisers who complain about images of butts-in-thongs, etc., we can crank down on our content to make it more and more sterile. This has the obvious effect of purging from the system a lot of things that are actually interesting to a lot of members of the community.

When your web community has a large number of 18-24 year old males, the probability that some of the images and videos they want to put on their phone and share with others could have subject matter that falls into the “potentially offensive” category for people who are not 18-24 year old males is pretty darn near 100%. At the risk of further offending a certain slice of my current audience, I submit that this last conjecture is virtually inescapable given the aforementioned millions of years of evolutionary biology.

The second option is actually already in use by Myxer in some fashion. We currently allow users to turn “content filtering” either “on” or “off”. When “on” (which is the default), content that has been flagged as inappropriate will not be shown. When the user chooses to turn it “off”, even inappropriate content will be shown to them. The main problem with the current implementation is that it’s only a binary thing, and it doesn’t account for people that want to, say, allow “profanity”, but still block…Julio Eglasias or something.

We’re actually in the process of trying to understand whether we can adopt some of the (admittedly very flawed) guidelines maintained by the MPAA (gag) or TV ratings people for Myxer. I don’t have terribly high hopes, but it might turn out that implementing something like this will at least keep people who don’t consider the issues as carefully as we do happy enough to give us their money for advertising.

Allowing sub-communities

The third option is philosophically really interesting to me, but it has implementation details that are difficult to wrap one’s head around. How does one choose the sub-communities? Is it possible to allow the sub-communities to self-evolve such that one need not define them ahead of time in a top-down manner? And then just the logistics of running an “appropriateness” test when displaying content from the Myxer catalog becomes computationally expensive and prone to error.

There are some specific segmentation use cases, though, that seem like they would pragmatically really useful. One thing we know from operating our website is that there is a rather large community of people who are really into hip-hop as a genre and as a lifestyle. The hip-hop community often makes use of language and imagery that, to people outside the community, is considered profane or hateful. The most often-cited example is probably “the n-word”, which we see used colloquially on Myxer in contexts where no offense is apparently intended.

Calling attention to the fact that I practice self-censorship when referring to “the n-word” above wasn’t my original intent, but it occurs to me that it illustrates the point fairly well. In my personal value system, that word is tainted to the point where I feel it is inappropriate for me to even spell it out – in my community, it’s just not acceptable. And yet I think it’s a word that should not be redacted in communities where it has acceptable and even very important connotations.

So I was trying to show an example of how segmentation of the user population into sub-communities could be useful. I’ll try to finish it off: if we had a hip-hop sub-community, that community could be allowed to self-police with the same “report as inappropriate” functionality we originally implemented site-wide. The ever-changing values of this hip-hop community could be tapped into to evolve what Myxer considered ‘inappropriate’ for people within that community. So if you were in that hip-hop community, it might be that there was a completely different set of words that were considered (by our system) to be profanity, which would prevent the values of other communities from restricting the speech of the hip-hop community.

Unfulfilling Conclusion

That’s really all the typing I can justify doing on the background of this topic right now. Needless to say, we at Myxer are extremely interested in doing The Right Thing (or at least The Rightest Thing Possible) to preserve the empowerment aspects of our technology while maintaining a comfortable and friendly atmosphere for people who visit our site. We want neither to censor nor to offend, but we understand these are impossible goals toward which we can only hope to ever advance.

We do have some specific refinements to our internal policies that we are putting into place that are too specific to warrant getting into, but this is just a small step and we will continue to adjust course time and again as we continue to grow and learn. I hope this discussion has been useful for at least one of the two people who made it all the way to end, and I would welcome any comments or suggestions you have on how Myxer can further improve.

Peace,

Myk

Sunrise

I got up early today and decided to bike down to the beach to watch the sunrise before work. It’s really convenient that our office is actually at the beach, because I get to do this more than just about anyone else I know. Except, I guess, the people I work with…

I’m going to sound like a crazy hippie here for a minute, but every time I watch the sun lift up over the ocean, when the sound of that warm salty breeze mixes with the subtly crashing waves, I feel like the world becomes a mirror possessed of the ability to simplify and refactor and strip to the essence any problems or worries incident upon it. It presents an austere but elegant reflection to an observer that accentuates that what is important and discards that what is trivial.

I told you I’d sound like a hippie.

So this morning, I went to the beach looking to clear my mind of some heavy thoughts related to work. The whole reason I was up at 5AM in the first place was because of said heavy thoughts, so it’s a good thing for me that the sun rises in the morning when I needed it!

Redux: The whole point of mVisible and MyxerTones is to radically simplify mobile content and services. Over the past two years that we’ve been operating, we’ve basically lumped the factors contributing to the complexity of developing mobile content and services into two camps: technical challenges and bureaucratic hurdles. What I’ve come to understand is that the technical challenges, while real, are really just engineering exercises. Not to belittle the scope of the technical challenge, but the fact is, you can (and we have) put together a competent team of engineers and build a platform that is technically capable of delivering content to just about any device on the planet.

And while we’ve framed the other class of problems as bureaucratic in the past, I think I have to now reclassify them as institutional. It’s not, as I’ve believed in the past, simply a matter of going through all of the required mating dances with the mobile carriers and the sea of companies in the so-called “value chain” beneath them. Yes, you certainly have to do the dance. But No, that doesn’t solve all the problems of complexity.

It turns out that the mobile industry as a whole has a tremendous amount of inertia behind the notion that delivering mobile content and services should remain complicated.

Carriers like Verizon force device manufacturers to cripple the phones they distribute to prevent consumers from using their full capabilities. They intentionally break existing applications with firmware “upgrades” not requested by subscribers. They take 50% of the revenue from any purchase made through their premium SMS channels – and at the same time contractually forbid partners from using any other competitive payment processors. Even if you don’t call it larceny, it’s an ugly oligarchy to be sure.

Speaking of ugly oligarchies. The recording industry, for its part, has apparently determined that its best chance of self-preservation is in assembling an assortment of extortionists, fear-mongers, and racketeers to harass and intimidate the very same people to which they market their limited catalogs of plastic pop stars and on whose computers they install spyware rootkits.

It must be a really weird thing to work in an industry that has harbors such blatant disgust for its own customers.

So what’s happened is that we, as MyxerTones, went into this whole “simplify mobile” endeavour bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, taking as common sense the notion that the easier you make it for anyone to offer their own content and services for mobile phones, the more value there will be in the entire ecosystem. Rising tide lifts all boats, that sort of thing. Anyone who has taken even a casual interest in understanding the history of the internet knows that every billion-dollar internet company (as well as the aggregate trillions in small companies doing business on the internet) is directly and unequivocally indebted to the uncompromising openness built into the network.

To think that mobile phones are anything but an extension of the internet is to embrace a legacy mindset. So to think that what’s best for the mobile industry is anything different than what’s been proven to be best for the internet in general is either arrogance or ignorance, neither of which is likely to bring longevity.

And what’s happened is that we’ve gotten caught up in the machine a little too much. We’ve started making product decisions based on who might sue us as opposed to what would bring the best value to our customers and to society as a whole. That’s what the sunrise made clear to me, and that’s why I’m so glad I watched it this morning, because I’m now 100% refocused on what it is we have to do.

There was a recent incident involving Digg a couple of weeks ago that you may have heard off. Turns out some super-secret magic decoding ring for DVD copy protection was figured out by some hacker somewhere. (Probably the Ukraine. They’ve got a lot of crazy number-smart people out there. ) So people started posting the magic decoder ring to Digg. Digg apparently gets served with a cease-and-desist or some such thing, and yanks references to the key. The users basically revolt, until Digg’s founder, Kevin Rose, eventually overrules their own lawyers and says screw it, we are a service, we are by and for the people, and we will not get in the way of what the people want to do.

Gutsy move. I mean, wow. It’s still not clear what the ramifications are for that. When Kevin refers to “a bigger company” in his post, he’s potentially guilty of a felony understatement.

This is my point: I, like Kevin Rose, believe that the pendulum has swung waaaaay too far toward the special interests and entrenched oligarchists, and away from The People. The entire reason I am involved with computers in the first place is because I was inspired by the early hackers who saw the great potential for individual empowerment through information. (Oh, and video games. I really loved video games.) So I’m going to make sure that when we’re building features into MyxerTones, we’re always thinking about enabling, and we’re going to stop spending so much of our time worrying about this guy or that guy suing us or whatever.

Mobile phones are the first exposure to the internet for most of the world’s population, and it would be a lost opportunity of unparalleled scale if the openness of the internet didn’t follow to the new devices. Like, lost opportunity akin to losing the recipe for penicillin on the way home from the lab.

Lighten up, Myk. It’s just bloody ringtones.

No. No, it isn’t. The whole bloody reason people think mobile content and services is just Madonna ringtones and the Pope’s “Thought of the Day” is because the platform has been locked up so tightly, with so few people able to address it. It’s only when the barriers to entry are removed that we will start to see the truly innovative applications arrive.

I don’t pretend that there aren’t issues to be confronted by opening the mobile internet airwaves to anyone to share and sell anything they want, but I believe the issues need to be be framed in a larger frame of discourse than the narrow-minded worlds of the mobile industry or the music industry. Our society still has a very long way to go before it has a mature understanding of how best to balance individual rights with those of rights holders, and the way things are right now it’s clear to me that society would be much better served if companies like MyxerTones was less timid and more focused on enabling rather than restricting.

unnatural numbers – the short version

So the short version goes something like this: “natural” numbers (the non-negative integers we use for counting) are a man-made invention, and do not connect deeply with the fabric of our existence. There, I’ve said it.

I can’t tell you what a relief it is to finally say that out loud. So to speak.

Why do I emit such drivel? Well, it’s a rather long story, and I’ve been writing about it on again/off again for the past couple of months, and I have yet to sufficiently refactor my reasoning such that I am comfortable exposing it to public scrutiny. So I wanted to at least lead here with the short version so that I could briefly touch on some of the troubling consequences of this belief.

The biggest trouble is that I am now unable to map conclusions reached through any formal system – including, tragically, that old standby of geometry – back to the real world with any deep sense of certainty.   If the axioms on which these formal systems are based don’t have a basis in the real world, how can we trust that the theorems we derive with them have any semblence of Truth when mapped back to the natural universe?

But surely, natural numbers must exist, you say.  Why, look here: I have exactly 5 fingers on each hand.  And I have exactly one car that I drive to work.  And three quarters in my pocket.  And so on.  I’ll have to save my expanded reasoning for the long version of this story, but basically, I say that’s not true.  In your mind, you have elected to partition a specific clump of spacetime and model it as “your car,” and for the purposes of reasoning (in your own mind) you find it convenient to think of all the components of the car as making up a single entity.  But the idea that all of those components actually comprise a single, atom entity is a figment of your mind alone.  The universe has no need to oversimplify patterns of matter such that they may more easily be manipulated by logic, and so doesn’t see things that way.  I’ll look forward to digging into the reasons I think this is true later on.

For now, I’m just happy to have that zinger off my chest.

Write about what you don’t know

I am acutely aware that I never seem to write about things that I know much about. The wry and cynical amongst you are, no doubt, already crafting wry and cynical reactions to that statement in your head, sticking me with little half-vocalized jabs – “that certainly doesn’t limit the topic very much,” etc. Everyone that’s ever been on the receiving end of an email alias for which I’ve been allowed send privileges, on the other hand, is rolling their (collective) eyes, memories of one of my melodramatic missives discovered in their inbox like a phonebook on a dew-covered doorstep in the morning. Heavy. Appearing mysteriously in the night. Full of words, but having no real point.

I will admit that some of this probably stems from my rebellion against those cliched words of wisdom so often espoused for aspiring writers, that they should “write about what you know.” You know what I think? That’s crap. People writing about “what they know” is the primary cause of me being subjected to the multitude of bland, self-indulgent, and plain played-out plays and movies about (what else?) a struggling writer living in New York City, or about an eccentric [actor | director | screenwriter | key grip] trying to make it in Los Angeles.

My advice to aspiring writers is: don’t take advice from me. I write to exercise parts of my brain that don’t get much use in my day job, not to advice anyone else on how to go about their business (and certainly not to entertain).

I used to have a friend with whom I would spend lunch breaks talking about all kinds of weird stuff. Then he died in a tragic accident involving camouflage pants, a blender, and one of those “green screens” they use for special effects and weather reports. Ha, ha. Of course that’s a joke. He’s still alive. But he may as well be dead, because I never talk to him because he moved to Milwaukee so he could hang out with other (apparently geographically-challenged) artist-types who want to spend their time making films and goofy art exhibits and generally prance around like life is supposed to be fun or something.

Anyhow, this friend, let’s call him “Bob,” because that’s really his name, was a good outlet for wacky ideas. We could riff on things like numberometries like a couple of stoned philosophy majors getting a dip of the professor’s stash, only we were stone sober on account of (1) having jobs, and (2) realizing that they don’t call it dope for nothin’. (Bobby has since descended deep into the artist community, so I’m not really sure number (1) still applies to him, and number (2) might be losing its force of argument, too.)

Sometimes we’d talk about less crazy topics, like gravity and tides, or regular expressions, or fashioning makeshift splints. And that’s fun to a certain point. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake is rewarding and all, but after a while, when you get back to your office, you Google the stuff, and, yup, some guy spent 8 years getting his doctorate studying what you talked about over lunch, and more answers than you would ever want are available here and here and here.

It was a lot more fun to talk about stuff that we really didn’t know how in the hell it worked, and – more important – we’ll probably never know how it works. Because nobody knows.  That’s the kind of stuff that makes for interesting conversations, and sticks to your brain bones for a long time. That’s worth talking about.

But now that Bobby’s dead, it’s just me and my blog.

infinity of scale

For some time, it has bothered me to consider that the universe may actually be infinitely large. That’s quite a commitment.

I’m willing to accept infinity as a numerical concept, because numbers – or mathematics, at least – is a human invention so far as I can ascertain. If we want to invent some axioms that play out until not only are there infinite numbers, but an infinite number of prime numbers, and values of infinity that are bigger than other values of infinity, well that’s just fine by me. It’s more or less a game when it starts with rules we humans invented.

But the universe. That’s, like, the Real Deal. It seems like a lot of things would get really difficult if there was an infinite amount of mass and energy occupying an infinite amount of space. With all due respect to Stephen Wright, where would you keep it?

So I’ve been pretty keen on trying to visualize this model of the universe as a curved space-time thing that is finite in size, and yet without edges. Like the surface of a basketball to an ant who lives on it (and can’t look up and down, natch), but extended by a dimension or two. If that’s the case, I think I’ll be able to sleep relatively soundly. I mean, I’ll still have to grapple with this whole “what if my life is just a synthetic dream from which i’ll wake up and actually be in some completely different (imaginary?) universe and then I’ll wake up from that dream &c, &c, ad nauseum”, but at least the currently-dreamed universe will seem – while vastly, mind-bogglingly huge – at least conceivable.

There’s one little thing left to settle, though. These crazy physicist dudes keep coming up with more and more subatomic particles. I don’t know where they’ve all come from. I swear that when I was in junior high, all we had were protons and neutrons, and these whimsically orbiting electrons that orbited them playfully, sometimes taking long trips around nearby nuclei to make little communities called molecules, but always being happily, well, atomic.

The I start hearing about quarks and all kinds of other nonsense. Every time I pick up a science magazine there’s some new particles being proposed or discovered. Quarks, muons, gluons, Higgs bosons, all kinds of greek letters flying around. Is there no end to this? Will we continue to build better and better instruments and experiments, and never get to the smallest possible particle? In the world of computers, we get a cheap way out, because we’re playing in this artificial world where we’ve decided that bits are the smallest ‘particle’ and you can’t split a bit. End of story, go write some Fortran or something.

But in the real world, how can we have a smallest particle? You have to be able to split it don’t you? The alternative is that there’s some magic inflection point at which the smallest piece of matter pops into existance. It just seems so…impossible. But, then, it’s less impossible than what I’ve previously thought was the lone competing explanation that, indeed, you can keep finding smaller and smaller particles…forever.

But…What if it is indeed turtles all the way down, but there’s an important twist. Say you start at the nearest turtle, call him Yertle, and you start climbing down the stack from there. Of course, it’s turtles all the way down, so you can climb down and down and down and never get to the bottom. After you’ve been climbing for a few hundred thousand years or so, you get this funny feeling of deja vu.  Something seems familiar. One turtle in particular, Mack, is intriguing enough that you stop and speak with him briefly. After this little sojourn, you continue on your way down the stack.

Years pass, you continue climbing down, and after a very very long time, you start to get that funny feeling again, and who do you see, but Mack!  Right there under your foot, when you’ve been doing nothing but climb down for the past epochs since you last saw him.

With Google Earth, you would see this by starting in space, then zooming in on, say, North America, then aiming for the Great Lakes, centering on Leeland, Michigan, and then zooming in to a particular property, then a particular tree, then a single needle on that tree, and so on, through cells, atoms, subatomic particles, who knows what else, and then you see – the Earth in the distance just like where you started from. You’ve come back to where you started by looking at smaller and smaller things.

Could this happen? Well, I’ve been assured by a mathematician friend that one could construct such a universe in principle.  Could such a geometry be a model for the actual universe we live in? Heck if I know.  As I’ve pointed out before, I’m a bit of a bystander when it comes to advanced mathematics. But it sure seems like such a geometry would make a lot of things easier. To wit, we could have a finite number of subatomic particles, and yet still have no “smallest” particle.

Just as how you could walk in a straight line on the surface of a sphere and find yourself back where you started, so too you may ‘zoom in a straight line’ and fine yourself back at the same place after a long, long time.  So there really might not be a smallest particle, and at the same time, you can always find something smaller than the particle at which you’re currently looking.

MyxerTones Evolution

The team at MyxerTones has been working for a long time on the new release of our website, and we just went live this (last?) evening. I couldn’t be more happy with the process that got us here, and the new features we have in place.

I can vividly remember sitting at the bar of the Wynkoop Brewing Company in Denver with Marsha and Bill, talking about the potential for the company that would become mVisible. We talked about the many confusing and twisted ironies of the internet: borne by the US defense department’s desire to be able to retaliate effectively in the event of nuclear holocaust; yet inherenty decentralized by design; extremely simple in concept; amazingly complicated in practice. There’s been a constant struggle since the first DARPA packets were exchanged, between a centralized command-and-control architecture, and a decentralized, self-correcting, and redundant communitcation system.

At Wynkook, we talked of “taking back the internet,” actually doing something about the fact that something that was designed (by the engineers, anyway) to be completely decentralized was now almost completly controlled by a very few powerful players. PCs too closely shared a bloodline with the DARPA servers of yesteryear to really break free, but mobile phones, now, mobile phones were something different altogether.

We sat at the bar (mmm, Wynkoop had the best menu of appetizers you’ve ever seen, really, I think I could’ve ordered from the appetizer menu alone every day for a week), and talked about using the mobile phone to bring the inherent power of a decentralized, worldwide network that is the internet to individuals. What if there were no ISPs? What if there were no mobile “operators?” What if data flowed from person to person without having to go through any central switching point? Think of the power of this medium if people could freely communicate and exchange information with whomever they wanted!

They were sold. I was sold. It was a magical moment, and I’ll never forget it.

It seems rather melodramatic to talk of lofty topics like this when the company we eventually went on to found is currently…selling ringtones. But the fact of the matter is, we’re taking one step at a time towards our goal of empowering individuals to communicate and exchange information using their mobile phone as they see fit, not as fits the agenda of some global conglomerate. It’s all about the individual, and the amazing potential of the mobile phone. We’re on our way.

tipping

The airport newsstand is not where I generally find my reading materials. And the “business books” section of said airport newsstand is one of the specific places you’re unlikely to find me loitering. I rather pride myself on an aversion to the cheesy books one tends to encounter there, and so my first encounter with The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell comes some six years after the rest of the world was exposed to it. I’m intentionally recording my thoughts on the book before doing any internet research on what, if any, consensus has been arrived at by the hive mind.

Mr. Gladwell is best known, of course, as the love-child of Martin Short and Buckwheat:

+ =

…though some people may be surprised to know that he’s had an article or two published in an obscure rag out of New York with which he’s affiliated.

I’m not going to rehash the main points of the book. I’m sure there are a thousand better places to go for a quick overview. But a summary sufficient for my purposes goes thus: the Tipping Point explores the emergence and spread of societal trends (fashion, habits, crime, etc.) by means of a running comparison with disease epidemiology, pointing out unexpected non-linearities and providing speculations as to hidden causes for the explosive spread (or, conversely, failure to launch) of these trends. Though the book is ostensibly aimed at business readers (according to its marketing collateral and genre filing in the newsstand), its most compelling proposals seem to be the novel approaches to problems such as crime, smoking, and disease eradication suggested by example.

First, a coincidence, connection, link, call it what you will. The opening example given in the book is that of the resurgence of Hush Puppies as a stylish footwear choice, in the mid- ’90s, owing to its kitchy-ness being mined by trend setters in New York. I happen to have grown up, K-12, with the son of the CEO of Wolverine World Wide (the company that owns Hush Puppies). We did an incredible number of shockingly stupid things together. Anyway. What’s interesting is that my schoolmate’s name just came up in a conversation I had with my sister the day before yesterday, and that’s the first time I’d thought of him in at least a couple of years. (The context of that discussion is not entirely relevant here. Let’s just say that he and I would provide a rather dramatic counterpoint to Gladwell’s insinuation that people growing up in the same social environment will tend to have similar values and lifestyle choices. Exhibit A: he became a close adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney. I, the record will clearly show, did not.)

The reason this connection between myself and the Hush Puppy, and therefore between myself and this very book, strikes me as so interesting is because I am – according to a test Gladwell presents in his book – not a very connected guy. Like, “please hang up and try your call again” not connected. Briefly, the test consists of a list of 250 surnames, and you’re supposed to go through the list and give yourself a point every time you “know” someone with that last name. Tally up your points, that’s your ‘connectedness’ score. The average score on the test is 41. The scores for those ’super nodes’ in the global social network, people deemed to be those all important “connectors” that figure into Gladwell’s scheme of things, are over 100. I scored 11.

While the talk about the necessity of Connectors, Mavens, and Salesman to make something really ‘take off’ is interesting, and the examples illuminating, the basic concepts seemed rather familiar to me, and therefore didn’t come across as revolutionary thinking. Perhaps my reaction would have been different if I had read the book in 2000 when it originally came out, but popular digests of complexity theory have given even a layman like me a healthy exposure to explanations of emergent behavior in complex systems that exhibit non-linear dynamics. Come to think of it, didn’t a different Malcolm teach us about that in Jurassic Park?

On the other hand, the examples describing environmentally-effected behavioral modification are truly fascinating. The idea that traits we normally associate with (assign to?) people are not constant, but are more accurately described as dominant behavioral patterns exhibited by the person in the environment in which we normally observe them never really occurred to me before. I mean, I’d been exposed to people who espoused, for example, making children wear uniforms to school to make them behave better, but I wasn’t aware of the various ways by which sociologists had studied the phenomenon. And I thought Rudy was just being a hard-ass by cracking down on panhandlers in NYC; I had never seen it mentioned that this was part of a larger effort to basically change the environment such that it would be less likely to incite criminal behavior.

I guess the trick is to understand how the environment can be manipuated to make people behave how you want them to behave. Eeck! Did I just say that?

numberometries

I haven’t ever become obsessed with making sense of the distribution of primes. I do, however, spend about 0.003% of my idle time advancing this half-baked hypothesis that the prime numbers represent the intersection of our world’s concept of natural numbers with the True Numbering System of the Universe. Like, we think of our numbers as this pure straight line through mindspace, with an equal distance between adjacent numbers, but maybe we only perceive one dimension of what is really a gnarled twisting line weeding its way through a space of much higher dimension. So maybe the prime numbers represent regularly, deterministically occurring points (or planes, etc.) distributed in the True Numbering System of 14 dimensions or whatever, and only seem random when seen plotted on our jagged little ‘natural number’ line.

Maybe like mass warping space-time giving rise to what we perceive as gravity, the multidimensional natural number line (of which we only perceive one dimension) is in a kind of “numeric freefall” that gives rise to oddities like the importance of pi and e and the distribution of primes, the cause of which would be obvious if we were to perceive the other dimensions.

And maybe there are experiments one can do to determine if that is indeed the case analogous to how the ant on the surface of the sphere can find out his 2d walking surface is actually curved along another dimension. The ant can carefully construct a really big circle by marching out an equal radius distance in all directions from a center point, and then measure the circumference. c = 2pi*r, all’s flat, otherwise something’s going on. Perhaps there are equivalent experiments for pure numbers. Maybe prime numbers are the key to those experiments.

So just as there are an infinite number of geometries in which the value for (e.g.) pi changes – like the 2d surface of a sphere – maybe there are infinite ‘numberometries’ in which the distribution of primes change. We might be able to use the primes as a tool to untangle this rat’s nest of a number line we mistakenly think of as being pure and straight, and learn the shape of the underlying numberometry of the universe.

Finally, I think we as a society should be spending far more time being blown away by the fact that one can explain some quantum electrodynamics phenomenon only when you admit that there are subatomic particles popping in and out of existance while travelling backwards in time. How cool is that?